Chapter 1
For months, I had been studying the historic lay of the land by looking at the trees. I could spot, thanks to Dad’s training, old homesteads by the presence of towering oaks, and I could tell where fence lines used to run by watching for the spires of cedar stretching across the fields. Sycamores told me where water was and where it had been in the recent past, and dogwoods signaled the edges of forests and farmyards that had once been. These signs had been easiest to spot in winter.
Now, though, I was torturing Sawyer on every card ride by pointing out the daffodil stems and iris fronds that were poking up along the side of the road. Clumps of the bright green bulbs hung to the root balls of trees, and alongside of the lane to our own farmhouse, I’d just spotted daffodils and crocus coming up in what would be a bright swath of color for us and for our neighbors.
My favorite batches of flowers, though, were the ones that came up where they seemed spontaneous. Along the edges of the road or in patches of pasture gone wild. These were the remnants of homes and families long gone. These were the bursts of sunshine they saw in the days when winter felt like it might never lift. I looked at these flowers – and urged Sawyer to, even when he literally growled at my suggestion – because these were the things that tied us to the people before.
And that was my work – pulling the pieces of history out of the past and setting them in the now. That’s how I thought of architectural salvage, and today, Sawyer and I were on the way to my newest salvage job at an old warehouse that had, in its final iteration after 100 years of use, been a small printing house for letter press books.
I’d gotten the lead about the building from a subscriber to my newsletter, where each month I told a story about a building or some aspect of history from our area and then talked about my salvage work. My subscriber list had been growing pretty steadily as people heard about what I did and realized I could talk about the places they loved and tell them stories they hadn’t yet heard. Now, I was getting a few leads off every piece, and this warehouse was the most exciting so far.
The building wasn’t sprawling like warehouses often are, which was good because I didn’t have a big crew. What I did have, though, was my best friend’s uncle Saul, who had decided to become a silent partner in my business. He ran his own construction crew, but as he climbed into his 70s had decided that doing the physical work wasn’t really in his best interest. He had a great foreman, too, so when I had a new job to scout, he came along with me.
As Sawyer and I pulled up to the warehouse, I spotted Saul’s truck, and then I saw Saul with his bright-yellow hard hat up in a third-story window. He gave a quick wave and a thumbs up before he turned back into the building. I sighed with relief. His signal meant the building was sturdy and at least relatively safe, so Sawyer could come in with me. He would have enjoyed a movie in his car seat for a bit if necessary, but I didn’t love doing that often.
“Okay, Little Man, let’s get your hard hat and go exploring,” I said with a smile into the rearview mirror.
“I ready!” he said and did the fist bump of excitement I’d taught him. “Let’s go!”
Before getting out of the car, I poured a small bit of water into a travel bowl and set it on the floor of the passenger seat so that our cat Beauregard, who had insisted on coming this morning, could drink. Beau didn’t travel because of adventure. Beau traveled because he liked the heated seat. I didn’t mind. He was fun to have along, especially when I had to give him a chance to do his business and walk him on his leash. A cat on a leash, it turned out, was a small but very real joy for people who saw him.
In the back seat, I unbuckled Sawyer, handed him his toddler-sized and very real hard-hat, and held his hand as we made our way toward the warehouse. The building was two-stories of brick, and it featured a central door that made it look a bit like the barns that were much more common in this part of Virginia. The windows above were leaded glass, and most of them were still intact, a fact that I considered a miracle given how bored teenagers are in the country.
As we stood on the small porch that served as a loading dock, I took a quick look at the land around us. It was mostly pasture, but I could see just off the side of the building, an abandoned set of railway tracks that explained why the warehouse had been set here, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, at one point. I told my phone to remind me to look up the short line railroads in this area.
Then, Sawyer and I went in, and I was immediately awestruck. The entire back of the space was made of windows, windows of all different sizes and styles that had been cobbled together to create this cascade of sunlight on the floor of the building.
I took a quick scan of the room, saw no gaping pits in the floor or open elevator shafts, and let go of Sawyer’s hand so he could explore and I could get a look at this window wall. It was magnificent and reminded me of those impromptu greenhouses that people made from recycled windows, only much more striking in its size.
“Pretty impressive, huh?” a voice said from across the room.
I turned and saw Saul smiling as he held Sawyer on his shoulders. “I’ll say,” I whispered as I touched my fingers to a 9-pane window. “We can salvage these, right? I might be able to sell them as a wall.”
“Just what I was thinking,” Saul said as he and Sawyer walked over. “Looks like they’re attached with brackets of some sort. Should be easy enough to get down.” He slid Sawyer off his shoulders, and my son barreled into me with the force a waist-high bull.
“Awesome,” I said as I took Sawyer’s hand and moved around the room. I saw a few wooden boxes, and some of the beams overhead looked usable as did the vintage light fixtures. But I was really most interested in sat in a dark corner near the wooden stairs at the back of the building: three, antique, letter press printing machines.
The owner had mentioned they’d be here and said that while he knew they had some value, he just didn’t have the time to sell them and hoped I’d be able to find them a good home. I had no doubt of that. The trick was going to be for me to part with them.
Each of the machines stood about shoulder-high, and while each was distinct from the others, they all featured some components made from wood and some from iron. I’d done some research in preparation for this visit, so I was able to do a quick once-over of the machines to see if they were complete. From what I could see they all had their ink plates and their rollers, but at least one needed new trucks, well, old trucks that worked like new ones. I felt confident I could get the parts they needed or find someone who specialized in the machines and would buy them because they could also get the parts.
As I ran my fingers over the ink plate of the largest machine, Sawyer said, “Look, Mommy, books,” and ran over with a stack of saddle-stitched booklets.
I smiled. I could tell, just from the look of the covers with their purple-inked trillium and the titles “Poems for a Virginia Spring” that these were some of the books here in this building. I took the books from Saw before he could destroy them and flipped through one. It was full of beautiful illustrations of flowers, and each image was paired with a brief poem. I started to read one but was quickly distracted by the sound of little feet on wooden stairs.
Saul was right behind him, and I decided I didn’t want to miss out on seeing what was upstairs. I tucked one copy of the book in my pocket and followed Saul up the staircase and into a surprisingly bright loft space. Clearly, this had been the main storage area for all of the businesses that had operated out of the building because I could see more books but also crates marked with the name of a local orchard that was still in business. In one corner, I found rolls and rolls of labels for tomatoes, and I wondered how many farmers had dropped their wagons full of produce at this building when it was a cannery.
I could feel myself getting excited. All of this stuff would sell – people loved vintage things that had ties to food – but more, I couldn’t wait to research what businesses had operated in the warehouse over the years. That was going to make a great story for my newsletter.
Saul and I made another quick pass through the building and then stepped out back to just be sure there wasn’t anything laying around that might be useful to Saul or sellable for me. In the past, we’d found stacks of t-posts for fencing that I’d been able to sell for $2 a pop to a local farmer, and at another house, Saul had pulled back a tarp to find four-inch thick boards of wormy Chestnut, a wood that was, for all intents and purposes, completely extinct. His excitement over finding the wood told me all I needed to know about how to thank him for all he’d done for me, and when I presented him with the wood, all cleaned up by Sawyer and me on a warm, sunny afternoon, he had choked up.
Now that wood was going to be the flooring in a brand-new house that Saul’s crew was constructing up on a mountain side. He’d even asked the owners if Sawyer and I could come see it as soon as it was in, and they’d graciously agreed and suggested we play to bring something to leave our mark in the corner of the floor. Dad had loaned me his wood-burning set, and Saw and I had written “Sutton” with a heart in the corner of what would be their living room. Some historian someday was going to get very frustrated trying to figure out what Suttons had lived in that house, but the delight in Sawyer’s face erased any guilt over putting my colleagues to a futile task.
Today, though, all we saw was a stack of old pallets that I’d take for Dad and his primitive wood-working projects but that weren’t worth much in cash and a bunch of rubble piled over near the train tracks. Nothing much at all.
Still, this was going to be a lucrative job, and I was eager to get started, especially since I now had my very own staging and storage space over at Saul’s construction headquarters. He’d graciously offered me my own “boneyard” a couple months back, and I was loving having a little workspace of my own. Dad and Lucille had even bought me a little shed to use an office, and now I had a sign – hand-painted by my friend Mary Johnson – that said, “Paisley’s Architectural Salvage” on the side of the building.
I wasn’t yet Mark Bowe of Barnwood Builders-fame, but I was getting there, one salvaged window at a time. To date, my most lucrative sale had been to a couple who bought all the beams we’d pulled from an old farmhouse. They’d recreated the basic footprint of the house for their living room and dining room and wanted to reuse the beams in as close to their original positions as they could. The finished product, which Saul’s crew built, was a gorgeous post-and-beam style house with large kitchen and master bedroom additions. It was more house than Sawyer and I would ever need, but it was beautiful.
As I loaded Sawyer into this car seat, I asked Saul if his crew would like to take the lead on this demolition job or if I should hire another crew. I had been saving as much as I could to expand my business, and I thought I could afford to hire one crew for one day to get the main stuff. Then, I’d just rent a bulldozer and tear down the rest, per my agreement with the owner. He wanted the building razed and the rubble hauled away. That was another day or two’s work, but since it didn’t have to be done until July, I had time to save up again.
“Paisley girl, you are not to be spending your money on a crew. That wood you gave me bought you rights to my crew anytime you need them for the rest of this year, okay?” He stared at me until I nodded. “And soon, you and I need to have a conversation about your next steps in the business, okay?”
I smiled over my shoulder and said, “Okay, Saul. Thank you.” I was so very grateful for his help, and so very uncomfortable taking it. But one thing I’d learned in the year or so that Sawyer had been living with me primarily was that I really had to accept help when it was offered.
“Help me with something now that Sawyer is secured?” Saul said. “It’ll just take a minute.”
“Sure, just let me get him some videos.” I pulled the phone out of my pocket and handed Sawyer a bag of fruit snacks and his favorite videos of panda bears that rescue people. “I'll be right back, Love Bug.”
I closed the door and locked it behind me as I followed Saul back into the building. He led me down a set of stairs I hadn’t even noticed and then used a crowbar that he took from his belt to pry open the closed elevator doors.
There, stacked four or five high, were dozens of bags of potting soil. I had never understood why people bought soil this way when local farmers and soil-growers would bring it by the truck full, but apparently, the sway of the big box stores held still, even way out here in the country.
“I want to take this to that community garden those folks are starting where we took down that house. You mind?” Saul bent to heft a bag onto his shoulder and onto a stainless-steel cart that reminded me of the ones they’d used to bring out the fixings for the salad bar in my college cafeteria.
I followed suit as I grunted out, “No, of course I don’t mind. Great idea. Thanks for thinking of it.” I meant what I said, but despite the fact that I hauled 40-plus pounds of toddler around most days, I was not finding it easy to heft a 50-pound sack of wet dirt. The prospect of lifting 15 or 20 more was not appealing.
Still, Saul and I got a few bags onto the cart and then he wheeled it toward the rear of the building. Through the door there that Saul had propped open with one bag of soil, I could see his pick-up truck. It was probably twenty feet away, but it seemed like four hundred.
While I waited for Saul to come back with the cart, I started to use the strongest part of my body, my legs, to shift the bags across the floor and closer to the door. I figured a few feet less to walk, even with a cart, was a win.
I was just beginning to shuffle the final bag in the front of the elevator shaft toward the back door when something caught my eye. I bent down and looked closely at the blue triangle I could see protruding from underneath the remaining bags. It was denim.
My heart started to pound, but I tried to take a deep breath and remind myself that many things were made from indigo-dyed fabric – purses, aprons, maybe some kind of bag that they used in this warehouse.
“Saul,” I said in a shrill voice, “I think we need to look at something here.”
He jogged over. “What is it? You didn’t find another dead body, did you?” He jostled me with his elbow to accompany his not-so-funny joke. Then he looked at my face, and all the color left his.
I pointed down at the fabric on the floor and then began removing the bags on the left side of the elevator. Somehow now I had much more strength, and Saul didn’t even huff as I handed him each bag to set beside us.
I was just reaching for the bag closest to the floor when he said, “Paisley, let me,” and moved to step in front of me.
“No, I need to do this. It’s my job, my business.” I bent down and carefully shifted the bottom bag with my foot.
There, clad in bell-bottomed denim, were the bones of a human leg.
Given how long the body must have been there to become only bones, we knew there was no rush to move quickly. So by silent agreement, we worked carefully instead, shifting each bag away and revealing the body, a headband still hanging from the skull.
Once she was clear and free, I stepped back and said, “Saul, not again.”
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